One Star

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Sex, Your Angel, and Starting the Ritual

A lot of my work lately has
been focused on helping people who are maybe ready to look at
reaching out to their Holy Guardian Angel and seeking Knowledge and
Conversation bridge the gap between maybe being ready and going ahead
and going for it. I try to make resources available and try to help
answer questions. One question which has come up a couple times in
the last month or so is “Do I really have to be chaste? I'm not
sure my wife will like that.” It's something that's reasonably at
the forefront of a lot of people's minds when they consider a big
ritual like that, and is easily a bit of a turn off for people. Some
people might say if someone isn't willing to go through that effort
then they don't deserve the benefits. I don't think that's the right
answer.

In general, to a lot of
people, the Abramelin working looks big and daunting and
inaccessible. In reality, Abraham of Worms talks about a whole lot of
things in his long story of his journey and his exposition of his
ideas, many of which magicians who have done the Abramelin don't
carry into their work once they've done the ritual, even if they
argue for kind of an Abramelin purism. But in terms of the ritual
itself, at least in the German version, a lot of it is kind of left
to your own devices.

Your angel should be guiding
you on a lot of specifics of what to do and how to do it. This is
true too on the question of chastity. But, a lot of people want some
human advice as well, so let's look at the question and why I don't
think it's a deal breaker.

In general there are
benefits to ritual chastity even outside of the grimoires and the
Abramelin. Making a choice to be chaste for a time presents a feeling
of self sacrifice and a test of being able to focus and execute your
will despite other drives and desires. This feeling can be useful in
creating a sense of capability in a ritual setting. Fasting can
create the same kind of mental benefit. Piggy backing off of that
idea, many of us also tend to associate asceticism with spirituality,
even if our own spiritual practices don't call for it, because it's
just a common cultural association. So these purifications can help
us feel more spiritual because of those associations.

They can do more than this
though.

Ritual chastity and fasting
change our biological states, and so they create alterations in our
mood and, depending upon the extremity, our awareness. These changes
can be positive or negative depending upon how they affect us as
individuals.

Along with these biological
changes, refusing a bodily impulse can create an added focus, desire,
and increased drive, but not necessarily for the thing we are
denying. We can eliminate indulgence in sex and in pleasurable foods
and focus the need for satisfaction on our spiritual desires. The
energy that we would focus on fulfilling our bodily desires becomes
focused on our angel, the tension we experience from desiring becomes
a tension surrounding the desire for our angel. We become one pointed
by eliminating those things which could otherwise distract us from
our one pointedness.

Or at least, maybe we do.

For some people it might
create a preoccupation with fulfilling the denied desire. Or they
might become fixated on their success at denying themselves to the
point that the exercise becomes more about self-restriction and less
about orientation towards the goal. Fulfilling healthy human needs
can keep us on track when doing things that are difficult because we
alleviate a natural biological distraction. Most people can probably
think back to adolescence and how much easier homework was if you
took a few minutes of “me time” when focusing became otherwise
impossible.

So yeah, there is potential
utility and potential detriment in both choices, depending largely
upon you as an individual.

The big thing, regardless of
whether you end up being chaste or not chaste, is to not let physical
sexuality and other physical desires subvert your focus and
commitment to the ritual. It goes a little beyond that though...and
because it goes a little beyond that, yeah, some of you might need to
be chaste.

The Abramelin doesn't tell
you to give up things just because they might become distracting. A
lot of the rules regarding abstinence are pretty clearly modeled on
ritual purity rules that occurred in other forms of magic. There is a
significant overlap in my view between the Abramelin and the early
Jewish mystical traditions associated with the Merkavah.

In the Merkavah tradition we
find descriptions of Rabbis being pulled from visions of heaven by
having a rag which touched a menstruating woman being brought into
contact with them, because even that indirect disruption of their
ritual purity was enough to make them no longer pure enough for
angelic contact. In the associated apocryphal scriptures angels refer
to man as smelling like a “white drop” or semen, suggesting that
the angelic hatred of mankind stems from the offensive nature of our
physicality and how filthy they perceive it to be. Angels are
presented as being pretty anti-human in a lot of cases and this
perception seems to creep into some elements of medieval and
renaissance magic.

But this isn't always the
case. In Liber Juratus angels don't hate humans, humans can do magic
with angels because they share in their love for the creator. In
Hermetic and Neo-Platonic worldviews it is again the human ability to
reconnect to the divine or to mirror the divine image that drives our
work with spirits. Even in Jewish magic it can be argued that God is
the God of magic, and as that is the case humans do magic based upon
God desiring it to be so, and so angels aid in that magic because it
is in harmony with the divine will that man experience magic. Taking
any of these view points, the idea that spooge disgusts angels so
much that they need us to be chaste for 6 to 18 months in order to
talk with us makes a lot less sense. In fact, if that were the case,
everyone who achieves knowledge and conversation would have to
maintain that level of purity, and that certainly isn't the case.

So why would you need to, or
not need to be chaste?

In my experience, angels
don't hate humans the way they do in stories. Rather angels hate the
stupid shit humans do that gets in the way of humans being awesome.
They hate when we are lazy, they hate when greed or lust for things
distracts us from what we are supposed to be doing.

It would stand to reason
that the real problem is when we try to fill our God sized holes with
sensory indulgences so we can ignore the beauty and harmony of the
cosmos despite the fact that engaging the cosmos would fill the hole.

Angels want us to be
awesome. When they're accused of being dicks it's because they force
us to work on ourselves in ways that can be difficult. People like
working with demons because when you want something they say "sure,
easy" but if you sit and have a chat with an angel, even if
they'll help you out, a lot of the time they want to lead you to
improve yourself or work in some way that will be beneficial to you
from a big picture perspective rather than just looking at the
specific instance you want help with.

Angels want you to be
awesome.

When they look at you they
see their creator, and they love their creator. When you aren't
embodying who you are and who you can be it obscures the reflection
of God in you. When you think on your own life, if you care about
someone and see potential in them and they aren't working towards
that potential, you want to help them get there, you want to push
them a little, give them advice, maybe even be hard on them if it
will help them. You want to see their success and all the glorious
sense of completion that that success conveys. Same thing here.

The Holy Guardian Angel
operates in this way even more so than other angels. Its job is
wholly to get you to that point of awesomeness.

So again, in my experience,
the angel directs you to fix stuff that you need to fix. In my
presentations on preparing for the Abramelin I talk about getting
your life in order, something which apparently a lot of people don't
address when talking about this ritual. If you don't have stuff
together in your life you'll have a lot of trouble committing to the
work you need to do once your angel begins guiding you more fully.
The more distracted you are by random problems the less focused you
are on the work at hand. So part of preparing is really exploring
yourself and seeing what work you need to do on you, but also looking
at your life and seeing what fires you should put out or things you
should situate in a more stable and balanced fashion. As you're
prepping for the ritual you may find the angel even helps you with
this.

As you get closer to the
ritual the angel will also make it clear what things you should be
giving up or what things you might need to add to your life in order
to help straighten yourself out for him to connect with you.
Personally, I used chastity as I described it above, as a means of
focus and reorienting my drive and desire, but I only used it in the
penitent days at the beginning of the ritual, and when preparing for
and during the final phases of it, the stuff I had to change had more
to do with healthy living. I have one friend who did the ritual and
their angel was very clear that they needed to be chaste. A reduce in
interest in sex followed the ritual for this individual, and so I
would guess the angel felt that was something particular to that
individual's needs. Another friend had to reduce consumption of meat,
but not fully eliminate it, and had to get rid of alcohol, and their
angel took measures during the working when this person stepped
outside of those instructions to reign them back in. Once the ritual
was done this person recognized that while consuming meat and alcohol
was again ok, there was probably a need for a change in behavior from
what it was prior to the ritual. I know a handful of well known
magicians who successfully used Liber Samekh or variations thereon in
lieu of doing the retreat based on either the French or German
manuals, I doubt that they were all chaste during it.

In the end, trust your
angel. If sex is a problem for you, your angel might inspire you
towards a period of chastity...but it will probably be good for you
and help you not just with your working but with other elements of
life. If sex isn't a problem your angel probably won't be pressed
about it so long as it isn't disrupting the ritual, and you consider
points in the ritual where either chastity or sexual activity might
be beneficial from a magical perspective, you can go ahead and keep
having sex. If your problem is junk food, or meat, or alcohol, or
gambling, or shoe shopping, or whatever, your angel will let you
know, and the need to be chaste regarding that problem will be pretty
clear. But it's between you and your angel. So if your angel hasn't
told you sex isn't ok, it's probably ok, but like all things, in
moderation.

So, one thing that you can
skip the moderation on, is this blog. We're going to be running a
special series of posts starting this week. So like and follow us on Facebook, and please share with your friends, so everyone can enjoy
the special series. And if you have questions about seeking your HGA
feel free to leave a comment.